Network content providers that deal with high volumes of digital content often have difficulty prioritizing which Web pages or other addressable network resources containing digital content to present to a user. For network content providers that enable users to make purchases, this problem can translate into an inability to generate sales as users are presented with large numbers of Web pages including content that describe products they have little interest in buying. Users can be easily overwhelmed by choices and can find it difficult to identify a desired product in the absence of useful suggestions from the network content provider. Network content providers dealing with high volumes of products and content often try to provide useful recommendations to users by suggesting products based on past purchasing patterns and user interest.
In addition to product pages devoted to specific products, many network content providers maintain large numbers of browse pages linking to other product and browse pages. These browse pages allow a user to navigate through a site by following links from each page to the next. Since these browse pages may contain many links to other pages, and because a number of browse pages may link to any single other page, the network content provider may offer many more browse pages than product pages. In addition to the sheer quantity of browse pages, these pages are often not associated with specific products, and therefore lack associated purchasing data to generate appropriate user recommendations.
The combination of a high quantity of pages and the lack of explicit sales figures to drive a recommendation heuristic make it difficult for a network content provider to determine an optimal recommendation and linking strategy between pages. Additionally, a network content provider may wish to optimize a series of linked pages differently to meet different business or technical objectives depending on the purpose of the site. For example, it may be desirable to optimize browse and/or product pages for a new product to encourage user exploration and education, while in other cases it may be desirable to optimize browse and/or product pages for a well known product line to encourage a high user purchase volume.